Running Away
by Silwen Aurdomiel
Summary: "Sometimes Draco Malfoy wondered if surviving the war had been easier than surviving the aftermath." A short drabble


A/N: Wow, I haven't been back here or written fics in _ages_. This is just a random drabble-y drabble that had been turning around in my head last month and I eventually just had to get it out on paper (so to speak). Forgot about it until I was cleaning out my computer today and I was loathe to just delete it completely, so, for better or for worse, here it is.

* * *

Sometimes Draco Malfoy wondered if surviving the war had been easier than surviving the aftermath. After the war Lucius had been sentenced to a ten-year term in Azkaban and Draco had been given the choice between returning to Hogwarts to repeat his seventh year and aid in rebuilding the war-torn castle or serving out a year-long house arrest. He couldn't stand the thought of having to return to Malfoy Manor, surrounded and imprisoned by the reminders of the Dark Lord, the Death Eaters, and what he and his own family had done and suffered through. So he returned to Hogwarts with a handful of other "eighth year" students.

He was the outsider in the group. He supposed the Slytherins had always been outsiders, always regarded with suspicion – and in his last year, with loathing and fear – by the other three Houses. It was natural that his other fellow "eighth years," a couple of Gryffindors and Ravenclaws and one Hufflepuff, ignored his existence among them – there was after all, no love lost between them in all their six or seven years together as classmates. But it surprised him – though, in retrospect, it shouldn't have, he realized – to find loathing glares directed at him by other Slytherin students as they passed him in the halls or tolerated him sitting alone at the end of their table at meal times. Those students whose parents had been revealed and imprisoned as Death Eaters blamed him and his family for their cowardice and betrayal of the Dark Lord, while those students who had simply been unfortunate enough as to be placed in this infamous house by the talking hat blamed Draco for the stigma they unjustly suffered from the rest of the school. He'd decided that the best plan of action was to keep his head down, hide in the library, and get through this damned year and then head overseas to join his mother.

But Asteria Greengrass had other plans.

He vaguely remembered her being the younger sister of his classmate Daphne. In the last year the younger Greengrass had officially taken over Draco's former role as unofficial leader of the Slytherin House and had been newly appointed as a sixth year Slytherin prefect. She also had apparently taken it upon herself to rectify the Slytherin name that Draco had single-handedly dragged through the mud (well, maybe not quite single-handedly; Voldemort himself had been a Slytherin after all). Draco hadn't known quite what to make of her when she'd first approached him and asked for his support and help. Her nerve had struck him as much more Gryffindor than Slytherin, truth be told, and she certainly had a knack for getting along with the Gryffindors – she'd became fast allies and even friends with Hermione Granger, who had naturally returned to make up her missed seventh year and N.E.W.T.s, and Ginny Weasley, the new Head Girl. Though, Draco supposed, it could be said that it was awfully Slytherin of Astoria to seek such allies – the best friend and girlfriend of the Boy Who Lived, also both heroines of the war in their own rights. Not to mention, everyone knew Granger's love for lost causes and harmony and unity and equality and all such good things. So he didn't really know what she was getting at when she asked for his help, he who on a good day, was ignored, and on every other day, completely loathed by every house in the school. He hadn't, couldn't, listened to what she'd been saying about his natural leadership among his House and his responsibility to his housemates and classmates and had, instead, simply walked away.

But the seed had been planted. He hadn't thought, or even realized, really, before that day that he may in fact have the power to make some amends for what he had done. It was a novel idea, that he had the power of decision and action, and it kept him up tossing and turning at night. Of course, the larger part of him thought it would be useless whatever he did; they'd always regard him as an outsider, a coward, a traitor. So he pushed these strange thoughts away and went back to hiding in the library until he could legally flee the country to France.

But when Lucius suddenly fell ill and died a year into his prison sentence, he was suddenly faced with brooding reflections over the brevity and fragility of his own life, and how he didn't want to be remembered the way his father would be. This life of being ignored or pretending to ignore the hateful looks sent his way was not much better than no life at all. And that was when he left to go fight in Russia.

Much of central Wizarding Europe was at war. Most of the Death Eaters in Britain had been captured and imprisoned, or were otherwise dead, but that wasn't to say the Dark Lord had no more supporters. When it became clear that supporting Voldemort's ideals had become dangerous and stupid in Wizarding Britain, most of these lunatics had fled to central Europe and had begun to wreak havoc there. Draco Malfoy was determined to choose the right side this time and stay there for the duration of this war. He wasn't looking to play hero and be the next Harry Potter, he just wanted to prove that he could and would fight for the right side. To whom he was proving this to, he wasn't quite sure. And it wasn't as if he was given much opportunity for it anyway. It turned out that even in central Europe not many people trusted the Malfoy name, and instead of fighting with the guerilla bands, he was assigned the task of cleaning up in the aftermath of the battles. There was nothing glamorous or terribly heroic about cleaning and healing the bloody wounds, or clearing away the dead bodies and burnt down homes. And he found himself wondering more and more who at home had been picking up after him, picking up the wounded and tortured left in his wake.

And then realization and understanding dawned on him. Not six months after joining the Russian guerillas, he left and headed back to Britain, back to Hogwarts. Asteria Greengrass, and even Hermione Granger and Ginny Weasley, had been trying to pick up the pieces of the broken house and broken school he'd run away from. But this, he knew, was his battle. His place was not in some backwoods Russian village clearing debris, but back at Hogwarts, trying to rebuild the school that he had helped to tear apart.


End file.
